SMS marketing is sort of B*ll S***

I know this is a weird take as an email and SMS marketer. I get it.

And I am not saying SMS is useless, I am just saying, how it is sold to people is largely bullshit. And I stand by this!

So, here is what I mean.

SMS does not drive as much revenue as you think it does, and the way that you capture and prioritise it can actually affect your bottom line.

Why do people think SMS is amazing?

A lot of the people who espouse how amazing SMS is, have a vested interest in doing so (keep in mind - I have this bias as well).

Companies like Attentive will talk about the effectiveness of the platform because their business model relies on it, and they even build their dashboards in a way that makes their attributed revenue (not real revenue btw) look incredibly high. And the funny thing is, once you move SMS from attentive to Klaviyo and see that a lot of the revenue happening via SMS is also being attributed to email and once you combine those platforms under one roof, SMS goes down because you are using last touch attribution, which is not a reliable way of tracking anyway.

A lot of people also see the success of say, an SMS welcome series and think ‘WOW, look at all these people using SMS in my welcome series to place an order’. Guess what, SMS subscription is more of a sign of intent and therefor, I would be willing to bet about 98% of the revenue in that welcome series would have happened without the SMS flow.

Why? Well, what type of person is most likely going to give you their SMS number… You guessed it, the person who is probably already going to buy and wants that discount code.

Why do I think it’s overhyped?

As I said, I think there is a use case, but not a massive one.

The reason I think it is overhyped is that, flat and simple, it does not drive as much revenue as people think.

On top of that, people capture it in stupid ways.

If I see one more person asking for someones SMS after they ask for their email, I am going to lose my mind. I was on a sales call with the guys from Alia, and he was literally trying to convince me that this was the way to do it. ITS WILD. Watch this video if you want to understand the proper way to capture sms intent, click here.

SMS is also super expensive relative to the country you are in. For example, NZ, good luck generating an ROI there.

When do I think it’s useful

SMS is great for the following types of campaigns:

• Product release

• Product restock

• Sale

That is it!

For flows, I like sprinkling them into a few of the abandonment flows and creating a custom welcome series, assuming you follow my strategy in that video above.

Don’t fall for the SMS hype.

I am saying this because the way you capture sms, use and prioritise it, can affect your bottom line. Once again, watch this video to see what I mean: click here

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